Optimizing Evaluation Patterns and Data Acquisition for Stream Analytics in Resource-Constrained Wireless Environments

Abstract

Mobile wireless devices may receive data streams from multiple remote sensors. The sensors may have limited power supplies and memory capacity. Aspects of the invention use statistical characteristics of the sensor data streams and the cost of acquiring a single element of each stream to determine what sequence the sensors should send their data streams in. The cost of acquiring the data may be modified dynamically, depending on parameters such as block size. Additional factors, such as a sensor's buffer capacity, may limit the amount of stream elements that may be cached and affect the sensors' stream transmit sequence. The evaluation order may be dynamically modified using an event processing engine, to reflect both changing statistics of underlying sensor stream tuples and time-varying acquisition costs associated with individual streams. This helps to increase in the operational lifetime of the sensors and associated monitoring applications.

Description

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0001]1. Field of the Invention[0002]The invention generally relates to event processing on resource-constrained devices, such as cellular telephones or other portable handheld devices, in wireless environments. More particularly, the invention relates to managing data streams for sensors communicating with mobile devices to promote power conservation and system efficiency.[0003]2. Description of Related Art[0004]Over the years, portable client devices have evolved from basic portable telephones and pagers to multi-function wireless 3G or 4G machines. Different applications can leverage the varied resources of a given client device, including embedded or remote sensors, to provide a robust platform that may, for instance, enable user heart rate analysis or other monitoring functions.[0005]Many applications of sensor networks involve on-line (near real-time) analysis of multiple sensor-generated event streams of data provided to a client device. Often, stre...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

The patent describes a method and apparatus for managing data streams from sensor devices received by a mobile client device. The method involves identifying multiple data streams, specifying an order for processing the data streams, and receiving the data streams in the specified order. The method then uses the data streams to dynamically modify the order in which they are transmitted to an event processing module of the client device. This allows for efficient processing of the data streams and improved performance metrics. The dynamic modification can be based on the partial result of a query predicate, the statistical distribution of values in the data streams, or the cost of acquiring the data from the sensor devices. The technical effects of this invention include improved data management and processing efficiency for mobile clients and improved performance metrics for sensor devices.

Problems solved by technology

However, these schemes do not consider variable costs and constraints associated with the acquisition of these data tuples, nor do they use these costs and constraints as inputs to the process of rearranging the sequence of data acquisition and evaluation.

However, this approach may only focus on snapshot (or one-off) queries, where the data elements for each instance of the query must be explicitly acquired through a polling process, and thus does not consider any temporal statistics of an individual stream.

However, such applications employing known methods for stream processing on mobile devices may result in unacceptably high communication-related energy overheads, and may thus result in limited operational lifetimes of both the sensors transmitting the data streams and the mobile devices themselves.

Images